The history of Memphis, Tennessee and its area began many thousands of years ago with succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples. In the first millennium, it was settled by the Mississippian culture. The Chickasaw Indian tribe emerged about the 17th century, or migrated into the area. The earliest European exploration may have encountered remnants of the Mississippian culture by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Later French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle likely encountered the Chickasaw. The European-American city of Memphis was not founded until 1819. The city was named after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River in North Africa.
It rapidly developed as a major trading center for cotton cultivated at the region's large plantations and dependent on the work of enslaved African Americans. In the 19th century, and especially 1878 and 1879, the city suffered severe yellow fever epidemics. In 1878 tens of thousands of residents fled and more than 5,000 died, with hundreds more dying in the next year's epidemic, causing the city to go bankrupt and give up its charter until 1893.
In the early 20th century cotton was still a major commodity crop; Memphis grew into the world's largest spot cotton market and the world's largest hardwood lumber market. During the 1960s the city was at the center of civil rights actions, with a major strike by city sanitation workers in 1968. Having come to the city to support the workers, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a lone sniper on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel. Many notable blues musicians grew up in and around the Memphis and northern Mississippi area. These included musical artists such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Isaac Hayes, Young Dolph and Elvis Presley.
Early history
From about 10,000 BCE, Paleo-Indians and later Archaic-Indians lived as communities of hunter-gatherers in the area that covers the modern-day southern United States. Approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, the Mississippi River Delta was populated by tribes of the Mississippian culture, a mound-building Native American people who had developed in the late Woodland Indian period. The Tipton phase people were a local expression of the Mississippian culture. They inhabited the region of modern-day Tipton, Lauderdale and Shelby counties during the time of first contact with Europeans, at the arrival of the de Soto Expedition.
By the end of the Mississippian period, the land was claimed and populated by the Chickasaw tribe. The exact origins of the Chickasaw are uncertain. Noted historian Horatio Cushman indicates that the Chickasaw, along with the Choctaw, may have had origins in present-day Mexico and migrated north. When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now Mississippi, with a smaller number in the area of Savannah Town, South Carolina. Twentieth-century scholar Patricia Galloway says that the Chickasaw may have been migrants to the area from the west and may not have been descendants of the pre-historic Mississippian culture. Their oral history supports this, indicating they moved along with the Choctaw from west of the Mississippi in pre-history.
European explorers - 16th/17th centuries
European exploration came years later, with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto believed to have visited what is now the Memphis area as early as the 1540s.
By the 1680s, French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built Fort Prudhomme in the vicinity, the first European settlement in what would become Memphis, predating Anglo-American settlement in East Tennessee by more than 70 years. Fort Assumption was a French fortification constructed in 1739 on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff on the Mississippi River by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville's French army. The fort was used as a base against the Chickasaw in the abortive Campaign of 1739.
Despite such early outposts, the land comprising present-day Memphis remained in a largely unorganized territory throughout most of the 18th century in terms of European settlement. The boundaries of what would become Tennessee continued to evolve from its parent — the Carolina Colony, later North Carolina and South Carolina. In 1796, the site became the westernmost point of the newly admitted "state" of Tennessee in the newly independent United States. However, West Tennessee was at that time occupied and historically controlled by the Chickasaw tribe, owned by possession and tribal rights.